Death Knight Abilities (Part 1)

Death Knights are the new sensation and are grabbing a lot of attention from the masses, and it seems that everyone is just about ready to roll one, if just to see how they work and what their spells and abilities look like. This is where this preview comes in, you will see, in full detail, some of the abilities Death Knights have and their effects on enemy monsters!

A level 63 Death Knight has been used in this preview, specced deep into the Unholy Tree. It is worthy of note that nearly all Death Knight abilities, before we start, rely on having either Runic Power built up or Runes available for you to execute your attacks -- these attacks will add debuffs, named "Diseases", and these can be worked with as either detonators for higher damage modifiers of your finisher moves, or simply as Damage-over-Time abilities that are able to be spread out to other enemies as necessary (with the correct abilities used).

We will start off our preview with some basic abilities and move forward to more complex ones, starting with the Unholy Tree's abilities as well.

Basic Abilities

Starting out, you will begin with 3 basic abilities, each will consume 1 rune of each (Blood, Unholy, Frost), and will add different effects on your targets. This will make it so that you will not have any trouble in the starting zone fighting and having to use your runes in any special order just yet.

Icy Touch - This ability allows you to deal Frost Damage to your enemies, and will increase in power as you level. This will also slow your target's melee, casting, and ranged attack speed by 15%!

Blood Strike - A very interesting attack as it starts to factor what we had explained above. This move will consume 1 Blood Rune, and deal 60% weapon damage and additional damage for EACH disease on the target, so if you have more diseases, your attack will be that much more powerful!

Finally we have the Unholy version of the starter moves, which has a slight twist...

Plague Strike

This attack differs from the rest as it consumes both 1 Unholy and 1 Blood Rune from your abilities whenever you use it - as it is the only one at the beginning you will be using it will still not create any conflicts when you fight enemies and use up all your moves at one time to avoid auto-attacking waiting on cooldowns.

Plague Strike will deal a low amount of physical damage (60% weapon damage) + shadow damage over the course of 12 seconds. In addition, this will remove 1 heal over time effect on the target! A great attack made JUST for PvP scenarios, kiss those lifeblooms and rejuvenations goodbye with Death Grip and Plague Strike!

Finally, to round off this first preview page, we will go over the ability everyone's been curious about -- Death Grip! This initial ability does just what it's been hyped up to do - bring your target closer to you and even stun it for a few seconds while it does so! A perfect PvP AND PvE move, which will make people remember Mortal Kombat's Scorpion as they use it.

Death Grip

On a 35-second Cooldown and 30-yard range, the Death Knight pulls his target next to him/her and forces it to attack the Death Knight for 3-4 seconds.

Worthy of note is the fact there is no mana cost involved in this baseline ability, so go nuts whenever you need to use it, the short cooldown is all your penalty for it!

Tune in next time as we go over more Death Knight abilities and their visuals! Expect constant updates to this preview.